What’s The Deal With Beef Tallow?

What is beef tallow?

Tallow is a type of rendered animal fat that can be obtained from ruminant animals, though here we’re primarily interested in cows.

It’s derived from suet, which is the hard fatty tissue that surrounds the loins and kidneys. Suet will be a very familiar cooking ingredient for our UK readers, where we’re also more used to the term “beef dripping” – that’s just a more general name for fat obtained from any part of the animal, whereas tallow is specific.

At room temperature, beef tallow is a whiteish solid, similar to lard. In cookery, it’s most often used for roasting and deep frying. It was also the first material used to make dipped candles, dating back to the Roman era, and was used widely for centuries before beeswax became popular as an alternative. These days, it’s even finding its way into the beauty magazine pages as a moisturiser – though as one Vogue reporter found out, it doesn’t work for everyone.  

Why are people talking about beef tallow?

So, beef tallow is nothing new – in fact, until quite recently most people would have described it as old-fashioned. It was the sort of thing you might find in your grandparents’ pantry. As a saturated fat, like butter and lard, tallow’s popularity suffered under the mid-20th-century crusade towards a low-fat diet, so younger generations had tended to steer clear.

We now understand a lot more about what constitutes a balanced diet and it’s no longer recommended to avoid any and all saturated fat as a blanket rule. As such, things like full-fat dairy products have been finding their way back into our refrigerators, and people are also looking again at what types of oils and fats they’re using for cooking.

Even more recently, humble beef tallow became the unlikely star of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s campaign to “make America healthy again”.

In a post on his Instagram last October, RFK argued that American fast food used to be healthier back in the days when they fried everything in beef tallow, and that it was the switch to alternative oils – prompted by concerns around the link between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease – that really started to negatively impact the nation’s health.

And this is sadly where things start to move into the realms of conspiracy theories. We can certainly have a discussion about the relative benefits and health risks of different types of fats, the best balance to maintain a healthy diet, and the food science behind using different oils for different purposes – but we have to start from a place of facts.

Is beef tallow actually better for you?

Much of the recent popularity of beef tallow as a cooking ingredient is based on the unfounded fear that the population is being “poisoned” with seed oils.

Oils extracted from seeds, like canola (rapeseed) oil and sunflower oil, are largely unsaturated alternatives to traditional saturated fats like butter, lard, and – you guessed it – tallow. Other unsaturated fats include avocado oil and olive oil, which often features heavily in diet plans that are considered the healthiest, like the Mediterranean diet.

If seed oils are unsaturated fats too, why are they public enemy number one for the TikTok wellness crowd?

“It’s so odd that the internet has gone wild demonizing these things. They are not to be feared,” Stanford nutrition scientist and professor of medicine Dr Christopher Gardner told the American Heart Association.

One argument that’s made is that seed oils are “inflammatory” due to their higher levels of omega-6 fatty acids. While not as heart-healthy as omega-3, we do still need some omega-6s in our diet, and the optimal balance between the two is something that’s still a subject of active research.

As Gardner pointed out, while omega-3s are particularly beneficial to our health, that doesn’t mean omega-6s are “bad”, and they haven’t been convincingly shown to cause the human body harm through increased inflammation.

Speaking to UCHealth Today, clinical dietitian Rebecca Kerber agreed. “Both of these fats, in moderation, are important for our health. Unfortunately, some articles like to pit them against each other, as if one is good, then the other must be bad.”

Another common charge leveled at seed oils is that they’re present in lots of ultra-processed foods, and that therefore they must be bad for us. Both Gardner and Kerber highlighted that the real problem here is more likely to be the proportion of our diets that are made up of prepackaged foods containing high levels of things like sugar and sodium, rather than the mere presence of a seed oil.

As to the health benefits of beef tallow itself, the Mayo Clinic points out that tallow does contain some unsaturated fats and fat-soluble vitamins that could be good for the body. There’s also some evidence to suggest that stearic acid – a type of saturated fat that is present in tallow – may not raise cholesterol levels to the same degree as other saturated fats, possibly making it a slightly better alternative.

The bottom line

Even as scientists are learning more about how different types of fats affect the body, one thing remains unchanged. They may not be recommending strict avoidance anymore, but professionals still agree that we should be eating less of fats like tallow than the unsaturated kinds.

“Very consistently, all the data say butter and lard are bad for our hearts. And studies show swapping out saturated fats and replacing them with unsaturated fats lowers the risk for heart disease,” said Gardner.

It’s very easy to lazily claim that “all seed oils are bad”. It’s much harder, though we would argue much more interesting, to engage with the complex and evolving science around this topic.

And the fact that many who take part in online fearmongering around seed oils – with no hard scientific evidence to back them up – are also the sorts of people who, say, tout the “benefits” of consuming the verifiable bacterial soup that is raw milk, is an irony that’s apparently lost on them.

All “explainer” articles are confirmed by fact checkers to be correct at time of publishing. Text, images, and links may be edited, removed, or added to at a later date to keep information current.  

The content of this article is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of qualified health providers with questions you may have regarding medical conditions.